If one Googles Hillary Clinton along with the words “hawk,” “war,” “intervention,” and other such words, one is treated to a litany of articles, listicles, blogs, Twitter debates, and Youtube videos declaring that she’s a legendary warmonger who’s always out for blood. We are led to believe that Hillary is a shoot-first-ask-questions-later type, who never saw a country she didn’t want to bomb and never saw a people she didn’t want to annihilate. We’re told that the entirety of her global outlook rests on flexing America’s hardened-steel, Mach 2 muscles at every occasion. Or, like some kind of Mossad sleeper agent on a forty-year-long mission, some believe her sole purpose in life is to create the best conditions possible for Israeli belligerence.

This is just from the left. From the right, we’re told that she hates Israel or, alternatively, loves it too much, depending on the author’s placement on the John Bircher–End Times spectrum of American conservativism. It’s also taken as read that Hillary loves Muslims, especially their female body coverings, and that she wants to prop up all the dictators in the world or, alternatively, topple them all. For the right, she’s a scheming mastermind of the devolution of American power or, alternatively, she’s just an ignorant fool with no plan at all.

All of this seems to me to be based on just repeating things rather than actually looking at the evidence, which is in fact pretty weak. My focus here is on Hillary’s critics on the left, as it is their prioritization of feeling and belief over the evidence—as well as a more holistic view of international politics—that most concerns me. One expects anti-empirical thinking from Hillary’s right-wing enemies (who are content to imprint any and all grievances, no matter their real provenance, on her), but the facts-based nature of American liberalism makes the unexamined quality of progressive claims about Hillary’s purported militaristic character troubling to me.

Generally the most prevalent examples of Hillary’s alleged militarism are her vote to authorize use of force against Iraq in 2002, her support for Israel during her time as a Senator, her call for intervention in Libya in 2011, and her attempt to escalate US involvement in the Syrian Civil War in 2011-2012. Those who know a little more about recent history will cite her call for more troops in Afghanistan in 2009, her urging of President Obama to carry out the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in 2011, her aggressive rhetoric on Iran early in her time as Secretary of State, and her reluctance to withdraw American troops too quickly from Iraq. Add in a few realist statements on American power here and there, which I’ll grant to some degree because of their ideologically fraught quality, and that’s about it. There’s not much more to go on.

Look, frankly, these don’t provide great evidence of an overall warmongering character. Her vote to authorize military force against Iraq was extremely reluctant, and of course she did it alongside a whole troop of other Democrats who aren’t regularly pilloried as hawks (many of whom voted yes with much less reluctance than she did). Supporting Israel is basically what everyone in Congress has ever done, and she’s just been in a more public position to talk about it. Sanders certainly ranks as a clear defender of Israel’s right to do whatever it wants without interference. As for Libya: in my opinion as an international historian, the 2011 intervention was essentially the only US intervention made in the last 50 years that was clearly for the purpose of genocide prevention. And it did that, despite anything that has happened in the ensuing years. On Syria, Hillary’s position was one of action over inaction, which involved another potential US use of force in theory. But consider this: a legitimate criticism of Obama’s response to Syria is that nothing much was done about the situation until it was too late. Hillary’s role in this inaction requires just as much criticism if we’re supposed to believe that she’s also somehow responsible for a fictional into-the-breech US response that never materialized.

What about all of these other, less-talked-about examples of Hillary’s alleged thirst for blood? Well, I’m not sure most of them are even really examples of war-mindedness at all. If urging Obama to strike against Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan is now considered the height of hawkishness, apparently all of our liberal denunciations of the Bush administration’s disinterest in catching Bin Laden were just crass attempts at political point-winning. We never really meant it, I guess, nor should we see it as Obama’s accomplishment. The word hawkish is thus broadened to include an operation against a man deemed US Enemy No. 1. Were we to wait until he was in US territory to do something? Were we to, like Bush, just not bother, so as to avoid annoying Pakistani and Saudi supporters of Bin Laden? Talk about cynical isolationist priorities!

Further, recommending against troop drawdowns in Iraq was considered by many to be the responsible approach to an irresponsibly commenced set of conflicts in the War on Terror. It was in no way about ramping up the war again. Likewise, the increase in troops in Afghanistan had to do with responsibilities that the US incurred after having invaded the country, to wide and broad fanfare, in 2001. I guess anti-Hillaryites, including the bulk of Sanders supporters it seems, just want us to “get out of there,” because we “always just make everything worse.” Well, like Samuel Johnson, I refute it thus: we leave, the government collapses, and we’re even more irresponsible than everyone already thought we were. This doesn’t matter, though, to many Americans on the left, who hone to positive stereotypes in which every person “over there” is automatically kind, generous, warm, thoughtful, passionate, spiritual, proud, reasonable, friendly, tolerant, and noble. This view of non-Americans is about the same measure of degrading and ignorant as the conservative version in which all foreigners are scary. They both depend on belief over reality, and they both express a lack of interest in learning anything substantive about the actual shape of the resources, priorities, and challenges other countries have. These ways of thinking are exceptionally America-centric; foreigners are just adjuncts to the conversation.

What about Iran? Well, does the country have some reasonable grievances against Israel? Certainly. Is it promoting its interests in the most peaceful way possible? Certainly not. Just because Israel’s increasingly reactionary right wing presents their argument about the Iranian threat immoderately doesn’t mean that an Iranian threat doesn’t exist. Look, Americans who think themselves enlightened because they know of the US’s role in the provenance of Iran’s problems fail to realize that this doesn’t mean that, somehow, Iran is filled with happy people yearning to just hear an apology from the West and from Israel—that Iran will somehow immediately become a progressive, reasonable regional and global actor, dismantling overnight a foreign policy predicated in its first instance almost entirely on hatred of the US and Israel. Just like with regard to Iraq and Afghanistan, this is ignorance masquerading as savoir faire. Again, it also appears to be weirdly America-centric, in which all it would take is an apology from the US for all of Iran to, now vindicated, smile broadly and rush to embrace us. Selling short much of Iranian society’s fundamental distrust of the US is to sell short the value of their society, period.

I said earlier that I will grant Hillary’s realist leanings pointing to potential hawkdom. She’s infamously talked about her respect of and friendship with arch-realist Henry Kissinger, to whom I think the label of hawk pretty justly applies. This is terroritory where possibilities based on ideological leanings matter, and on this we just don’t know how much she would or would not follow a Kissingerian line as president. I think she’d be more like a Zbigniew Brzezinski realist than a Kissinger realist, but we don’t know for sure. But, again, this concern is about the future and not about the past; her past actions are not nearly as hawkish as we constantly say they are.

One might further question how clearheaded the Hillary-as-hawk formula is on any level. As my earlier discussion of Middle Eastern politics and society hopefully alludes to, there’s certainly an argument that many on the left don’t have much true interest in learning about the places that they say, often rightfully, that we take advantage and/or harm. There’s clearly not much interest on the left in differentiating between American influence and intervention. Indeed, for the anti-Hillary crowd it seems the bar is very low for what warmongering even means, while for many Bernie supporters Hillary has been held responsible for every aggressive act of the Bush era (even the Sanders campaign itself implies that she bears a chief responsibility for Iraq). As Secretary of State, the story goes, she carried out intervention after intervention—all by her self or with the aid of shadowy conservative interests for which she faithfully stooges. It doesn’t matter whether or not this is true. What matters is that one says it often and ardently.

So Hillary Clinton doesn’t have much of a record as an aggressive military adventurer, and yet we’re led to believe by her critics that she rattles her sabre at every opportunity. How did this happen, and how does the “Hillary’s a warmonger” crowd sustain its anger with so little basis for its claims? Well, it strikes me that the Hillary-as-hawk position is mostly tautological. That is, it depends on continuous recapitulation and reaffirmations between like minds. We just say and say again that she’s a hawk. It is an a priori condition. This recursive tendency among Hillary’s critics on the left is key. The infinite variety of ways one can invoke the hawkish-Hillary formula has produced a kind of thought-tenement: a monstrosity built by repetition to a looming height that, in its very vastness, disguises a flimsy evidentiary structure that’s barely able to hold the thing aloft—a credulous incredulity. Somehow I doubt, though, that it will ever collapse completely, because those who dwell within it will continue to resist the reality for fear that any deviation from the idea that Hillary’s out for blood will cause the walls of their world to crumble.

Caricature of Bernie Sanders, based on official Senate photo (link). No commercial use intended here.

I find this cycle’s Democratic primary very confusing. I recently read a post on Facebook from a close friend, who complained about seeing comments from people decrying Bernie Sanders as an unviable candidate and a Democratic equivalent of Donald Trump. I found myself shocked by this, because what I’ve seen via my Facebook and Twitter feeds is a full-throated cry for Bernie and no one but Bernie. Among my cadre of friends and followers, a vote for Hillary Clinton is seen as tantamount to sedition to the liberal cause. It apparently matters not that Hillary has been a leading liberal figure, by any measure of the term other than the unrealistically idealized, for more than a generation. I’m not sure what kind of company the particular friend I mentioned keeps, but it must not overlap with quite the same subset of the population as mine. Based on my social media feeds, I’d have gotten the opposite reaction than she did if I said that I supported Bernie.

But I don’t support Bernie, and I didn’t find this a very difficult decision to come to. I don’t even really wish I could support him, in that ideal world that some reluctant Hillary supporters cite. Frankly, I don’t think he’s a very good candidate, and I like him less than I did before he started his run for the White House. There are two elements involved in my dissent to the tenor of the self-proclaimed “real” liberal-progressive demographic. First, and somewhat less important to the average American, is the foreign policy front. Hillary is a towering figure in foreign policy. I didn’t always think that Hillary had much interest in the rest of the world. I voted for Obama in the 2008 primary in part because of this. I saw her appointment as Secretary of State as a Lincoln-Seward kind of thing, but less apt for success. However, Obama, like Lincoln, was right: Hillary, like Seward, turned out to be an amazing Secretary of State. I don’t want to argue why this is, because it’s been made clear by many other people and is essentially self-evident.

The role of Secretary of State is America’s foreign minister, and yet appointments to the position often result, like in the case of Seward and Hillary, from domestic political dynamics. Realpolitik types would see this tendency in a negative light. However, the thing that the realists miss is that foreign policy ability isn’t as hard to acquire as the wonks would have everyone believe. Foreign policy nuts, myself included, love to protect their corner on knowledge of foreign matters most people don’t give a hoot about. In fact, reasonably intelligent and committed politicians learn the ropes quickly and benefit from good analyst teams. Hillary showed immediately that she could learn quickly, she had a great team, and she had a good relationship with the President. Most importantly, though, she proved that she cared a hell of a lot about foreign policy.

Bernie doesn’t care much about foreign policy. He and his campaign regularly comment on this, often using quasi-isolationist misdirections to bring the conversation back to the domestic issues that are Bernie’s core competency. You know, the whole let’s-talk-about-us-not-those-other-guys thing. Bernie’s a master at that, and he’s shown very little ability to talk with any kind of sustained interest and seriousness about the world beyond his borders. His record in Congress is pretty minimalist on foreign policy. His only real standout accomplishment he cites is his vote, as a Representative, against authorization of the Iraq War in 2002. This is considered to be an indication of some kind of special foresight or, worse, moral vision. I guess we liberals have a short memory: a third of the House and a quarter of the Senate voted against the measure.

The other element that worries me about Bernie is that his policy proposals lack shape, and Hillary’s criticism of this fact appears to Sanders supporters as defeatism at best and treason to progressivism at worst. First, I don’t think it’s appropriate to consider Bernie as the only choice for America’s vast and complex progressive class. Progressivism is not a contest in radicalism, especially given that what is considered radical today is pretty watered-down. Progressivism encompasses a great number of perspectives and goals. America’s progressive community thrives when it embraces a range of priorities and doesn’t kick out those who balk at overturning the system. I don’t think that Bernie’s vision accommodates a lot of progressives, as a matter of fact. We’re told that progressives who vote for Hillary are betraying the cause or being cynical. I heard the same thing in 2008 and 2012 with Obama; it’s a tiresome canard peddled by lefties who have the inherited or acquired privilege to insist on vanguardism over incrementalism.

Most people represented by a broader understanding of progressivism do not have the luxury of reveling in vanguardist fantasies. They have critical needs that require government protection of the slender lifelines that remain from the progressive accomplishments of the twentieth century. They have needs not yet addressed that require a practical (and, yes, pragmatic) voice in government to act as an advocate. Bernie is not ill-equipped to serve this role, as a matter of fact. But his campaign has not emphasized this part of his character, because to talk about it too much would risk attracting attention to the stubborn fact that Bernie’s 25-year experience in national politics makes him as much an establishment figure as he is an anti-establishment one. And that’s fine with me, but it wouldn’t be fine with a lot of his current supporters.

Finally, and really the most depressing of all to me, Bernie and his supporters are apparently so committed to the goal of breaking the power of America’s super-wealthy that they don’t even seem to believe in mutual responsibility for progressive goals and projects. In his discussions over health care, for example, Bernie has been very quiet about the tax burden on the middle class that his proposals would require. He prefers to talk about it as being largely funded through taxes on the rich, on corporations, and on finance. The middle class, he says, won’t have to contribute much to the universal health care system they will derive a benefit from. This is not only unreasonable, but it’s not morally right. I want my taxes raised to support a great expansion of what America’s government provides for its citizens. As a Europeanist and someone married to an EU citizen, I thus find it offensive that Bernie cites European health care systems as the model for his own. In Europe, there is a high tax burden on the middle class to fund such programs precisely because the middle class derives the greatest benefit from those programs.

Denmark’s Prime Minister recently said that he wished that Bernie would stop using Denmark as an avatar of Bernie’s vision for America, saying that “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.” To be fair to Bernie, he’s never said that he’s for a planned economy or against a market one, but I don’t think a lot of his supporters really grasp the distinctions here. I haven’t been generally impressed with the nuance of Bernie’s supporters’ understanding of the issues and of the terms used to talk about them, and this includes even their understanding of what their candidate actually says and thinks. The fact that Bernie wants a grassroots revolution and yet he doesn’t emphasize the need for his supporters to get involved in local and state politics tells me that Bernie’s real appeal is that he offers a lot to his supporters while requiring very little of them. His might as well just say “If you can manage to get to the polls twice, that’s enough. I’ll take care of the rest.” That’s not how to build a revolution, that’s how to arrange a takeout pizza. But I guess that’s the state of liberalism today.

America is at present experiencing an Orientalist moment. In recent months, there's been a series of events that have put the Middle East and its inhabitants on the central stage in the United States. In the post-9/11 era, it may seem that the Middle East is always on American minds, but that's not really true. People (not just Americans) are easily distracted away from things they don't really care about in the first place toward more ever-present preoccupations. Notice, for example, how easy it is for politicians (mostly Republican, but often Democratic too) to pivot from external affairs to internal ones, say from a mention of our reliance on Middle Eastern oil to a detailed discussion of domestic gas prices and oil exploration. It is harder to go the opposite way and have one's audience track the transition, say by moving from a mention of American petro-politics to an extensive debate on OPEC. Generally, voters are uninterested in seeing American affairs through a foreign prism. It seems snobbish, preachy, and suspiciously unpatriotic.

However, the increasingly extra-regional profile of ISIS, the Republicans' failure in the most recent Benghazi hearing, the Paris attacks, the San Bernardino massacre, and the Islamophobic furor stoked by Donald Trump and his supporters have combined to produce a stunningly pure Orientalist environment—an imaginarium of seemingly all the stale tropes, clichés, and faux-intelligent axioms about the mysterious East. The most clear example of this movement came in the form of an exceedingly clever Public Policy Polling survey, wherein voters were asked whether they believed that America should bomb Agrabah, which of course is the fictional kingdom in the Disney film Aladdin. 30% of Republican voters said yes, 13% said no, and 57% were not sure. This last figure I love the most: I imagine this 57% stroking their chins sagely and pronouncing with world-weary wisdom that they hadn't made up their minds yet. They likely hung up the phone and congratulated themselves for their maturity and restraint. Class acts, the lot of 'em.

Is anyone really surprised by these numbers? The same poll had 36% of Republican voters claim that they believed that thousands of New Jersey Muslims celebrated in the streets as the Twin Towers fell. This did not happen. Everyone knows that. My cats know it didn't happen. This year's flu vaccine knows it didn't happen. My right foot knows it didn't happen—and it should know, because it was on the end of my leg on the day of the attacks and had a clear view of the TV. It would remember. Yet more than a third of Republicans disagree with my foot, and is any reasonable person really surprised by that? Public Policy Polling tweeted the figures out with the hashtag #NotTheOnion, but did anyone actually imagine that we wouldn't get these kinds of numbers? How likely is it that the average present-day Republican, who must daily contemplate the ignorant, frenzied Islamophobia flowing from his TV, radio, and Facebook and Twitter feeds, would take a stand against the harming of a single Agrabahan hair without just cause?

Republicans being stupid about the Middle East isn't news; it's a fact of life like periodic hangnail pain and progressive, creeping prostate cancer. What's more interesting is the stupidity of the Democratic voters who were asked the same question. In their case, 19% supported bombing Agrabah's monkey-loving population and 36% were opposed to bombing it, even though it still doesn't exist no matter how much one doesn't want to bomb it. One might note that the distinction here is that, when faced with one's own ignorance about something Muslim-sounding, the Republican is more apt to say "bomb it" while the Democrat is more like to say "don't bomb it." Indeed, Salonbrilliantly trolled New Yorkers on the question and got some great mushmouthed quotes. My favorite is a woman who clearly feels her openness to bombing Agrabah is at odds with the liberal texture of NYC public opinion, very carefully saying, "I wouldn't say we shouldn't [bomb Agrabah], but sometimes we need to, um, do things that are necessary." She then confidently asserts that "Agrabah is located in the Middle East," like she's known it since she was, um, a child. Fantastic.

Once again, the "not sure" figure is fascinating: 45% of Democrats answered the question this way. There is daylight between 30% and 19% for "yes" and 13% and 36% for "no," but given the volume of "not sure" answers in both cases it becomes a wash; a great portion of Americans of both political stripes are "not sure" about killing Middle Easterners, fictional or otherwise. Imagine, for a moment, that we gathered those polled together in a high school gym and split them up into groups based on their answers. Back-of-the-envelope math would give us the following image: with 532 Republicans and 525 Democrats polled, we'd get groupings like 160 Republicans vs. 100 Democrats for "yes," 69 Republicans vs. 189 Democrats for "no," and 303 Republicans vs. 236 Democrats for "not sure." Of the last figure, that's a lot of people gormlessly umming their way through the issue of killing turban-wearers, no matter how they feel about Obama.

The picture is clear: we Americans are really, really stupid about the Middle East. It's just that the right is more violent about their stupidity, and the stupid left is more influenced by peaceful attitudes. The former is obviously problematic: how can one doubt that slack-jawed yawping for cartoon Muslim blood is rather more dangerous stupidity than its opposite? There is, however, something pernicious about liberal ignorance of the Middle East, precisely because liberals often paint political, religious, and sociocultural problems "over there" with largely the same brush as conservatives use. If the Republican is more apt to say "kill the barbarian," the Democrat is more likely to say "leave the barbarian alone." In both cases, the Middle Easterner remains barbaric—a perfect Oriental in all his contrasts of love and hate, frenzy and sloth, decadence and bankruptcy. The Republican wants to crush him for it, the Democrat wants to regard him with interest for it.

This positive liberal stereotyping reaches upward into the arenas of intellectual power, achieving a special kind of stupidity, in my opinion, because its espousers consider themselves antidotes to societal idiocy. For example, my wife enters an annual photo contest for recipients of an international research travel grant, and every year the pictures that win are vaguely yellow-filtered holiday snaps of Orientals at work and at play. Bonus points are always awarded to old, wrinkled hands brownly stroking young, soft-skinned ones. Missing teeth in a smile are also popular, and no contest of such a variety would be complete without naked brown feet stamping dolorously along a dirt track toward some menial, back-breaking goal. Liberal, mostly white people take these pictures, and they feel they've done some intellectual service by doing so. These photos encourage us to ruminate on the fact that, for the subjects and the rest of humanity's Eastern caste, a wretched existence is pure and righteous. For, as the Agrabahans sing in Aladdin, "it's barbaric, but hey, it's home."

I was born in eastern North Dakota, where my family were farmers. One of my earliest memories is of being woken from my bed and carried to the basement. It was almost dark, but as we went down the stairs into the cellar I saw my grandfather illuminated in the doorway by the awe- and nausea-inducing green light that suffuses the sky right before a tornado hits. He was in his undershirt and looked unconcerned, which for a North Dakota Norwegian of his generation wasn'ta reliable visual cue of his level of concern, for I know now he must've been very concerned. My father wrapped my brother and me up in two old woven rugs that my grandmother had made; there must not have been time to take blankets from our part of the house. The rugs were scratchy and moist, but I fell asleep like children can.

In the morning, I woke to find my world transformed. The tornado that struck had spared our house and farm buildings, but the high winds and angry tendrils stabbing down from the cone had created scenes of destruction in the windbreaks that surrounded the farmstead and lined our fields. I walked barefoot in the thick, black slurry that big rains produce in the Red River Valley, my makeshift mud-boots protecting my feet from the splinters of eviscerated trees that littered the ground.The tiny copse of old broadleafs around the house and the pines that stood in long columns in the field like loyal soldiers were my everything. To see them shattered and twisted and borne to the ground was awful, exciting, tragic, magnificent: a power had come from beyond the landscape of my tiny life and wrought mayhem for some inscrutable reason.

I often wake these days to a more grown-up version of that experience. Like in the aftermath of a tornado, my world appears unrecognizable due to the damage done by Donald Trump and his followers. Although Trump's hate-filled, racist, and anti-Muslim rhetoric is a product of the far-right, it has come to influence conservative and moderate Americans, and it is even tolerated by a portion of the left. The most recent Republican primary debate was, as Simon Maloy writes, a menagerie of fear tropes, with all the candidates striving to make clear to America that every citizen should be "scared witless by the looming terrorist menace and worried that they will be the next to die." Nipping at Trump's heels, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz all took the tactic of dismissing front-running Trump as a carnival-barker while simultaneously restating Trump's words through slightly less pursed lips and under domes of slightly less primped hair.

As fears about Syrian refugees and "radicalized" American Muslims stand in for fears about demographic, economic, and cultural shifts of a more complicated variety, conservative whites in America find such universal, comprehensive fear-mongering apparently comforting. It makes difficult things to understand seem easy. It references a terrifying worldlike a father pointing toward the mid-distance, warning his children that "there are bad people out there." For the modern GOP, "safety" from these dangers is intentionally illusory, because the obviation of such dangers would take away the utility of the tactic. We must be perpetually afraid for the game to work. Safety thus becomes a concept deployed in the same basic way that that father tucks his kids into bed at night, making them as safe as one can be from the "bad people" for another night. The next day, the routine repeats.

Treated such a way, his children might decide to seek out ways to be afraid so that they can be made to feel safe. I don't think that this is too psychoanalytical, for the system of perpetually meeting fear with swagger is an incredibly successful strategy used by GOP politicians and, it would seem, many people in the country live their lives this way. They experience everything that happens as an opportunity to undertake an aggressive response to automatically threatening circumstances. Given the success that Trump has had in poisoning our national dialogue, I think it's fair to say that he's not only giving voice to hateful private thoughts, but also motivating people to adopt even more hateful attitudes and then claim, to themselves and others, that they believed those things all along but were prevented by PC attitudes from saying them.

The modern Republican is thus increasingly encouraged to believe that everywhere there are dark hordes, whose attacks are motivated by their racial, political, and sociocultural categories. Black, Muslim, lesbian, feminist welfare queens rip Bibles apart during their eighth Obamacare-funded abortion. Dancing gay menand bent-backed intellectual snobspost Instagram shots of the guns that they stole from hardworking grandmothers and God-fearing National Guard veterans. The new SUV you've always dreamed of buying with your hard-earned bitcoins and gold bullion is pushed into a river by communist goons from FEMA, which declared the shining vehicle an affront to the almighty polar bear in the sky. Sugar is pulled from your children's mouths by Michelle Obama, who then gives it to the Chinese so they can turn it into poison to sell back to America in the form of mandatory vaccinations. The television keeps showing you things that you don't understand, ergo bomb all the Orientals back into the Stone Age.

This is a problem. And I don't know really what we are supposed to do about it. I feel like it has become impossible to have a conversation with someone of the "other side." I'm sure they also feel the same way about "my side." I feel intellectually uncomfortable with the tactic employed by Democratic leaders, who tend to talk about hate-speech and hateful proposals as the "real" anti-American values. Obama seems to do this nightly. But idealizing what America "is" or what Americans "are" is well-meaning but totally wrong and probably isn't even effective in altering the debate. As30 Rock's Liz Lemon says to her conservative boss, Jack Donaghy, when he uses the term "real America" to describe the South,"Jack, for the 80th time, no part of America is more American than any other part."

Maybe taking a more comprehensive view of what America is and what Americans are is essential to seeing our country through this troubled time. Indeed, just as Trump's garbled angst about the earth's 1.6 billion Muslims is representative of politics, so too is Bernie Sander's thoughtful statement on the Paris attacks and on combating ISIS. It can be easy to dismiss, as I've seen time and again, thoughtful and conscientious statements (whether from liberals or conservatives) as anomalies and thus not really part of politics in America. This kind of disgust with politics, writ large, is lazy and pointless—I'm sick of it, especially from liberals who like to act as if they are thoughtful and conscientious people who've had it up to here with "politics as usual." If you like what Bernie Sanders or any other liberal says, you should be glad that he and they are part of politics. Politics are what we make of them; they are what everyone makes of them. Americans are scared, and they are not scared. Americans are mean, and they are nice too.

As a society, we should be embarrassed by Trump and his effect on the GOP and conservative voters, but we also need to understand that, to some degree, politics in a democracy is about winning the right to shape the future. There are certain consequences, then, to beating back and outlasting the wave of hate and fear sweeping the country right now. Many Americans—tens of millions—will be crushed by Trump losing. We need to find a way to keep these people from winning, while also making sure that their alienation isn't so grievous and caustic that they make it impossible for any political movement to occur. Obama sensed this need and failed (both through his own faults and through no fault of his own) to find the appropriate method of engagement.

Perhaps the current propensity for right-wing hyperbole is indicative of a society-wide breakdown in simple manners. I have a close friend—a conservative—who, in a debate where I said I was tired of hearing athletes intone the same rote bromides about "giving it your all" and "leaving it on the field," said that he liked these kinds of things because they instilled a sense of decency and respect to a pursuit that is infamous for its arrogance. We talked about how this applied to politics, and I think now that he's right on that count. Maybe we should encourage each other to be relentlessly, even dishonestly, polite to each other. Maybe this would've arrested the GOP's decline into apoplectic madness. Then again, I wonder if it's like my tornado, which emerged out of a climactic mixture of cause-and-effect and accident to destroy what I thought I knew so well, its force and influence produced by almost untrackably rapid shifts in condition and growth. I know one thing, though: we cannot go to the basement to hide from this storm.

Image by Eric Harper, retrieved from Flickr (link). No commercial use intended here.

Two months ago, I wrote a piece on the refugee crisis that I shopped around to a number of outlets, but I could not find a taker for it before media interests had changed to a degree that made the piece seem obsolete at the time. This often happens to writers, of course, and at some point one has to put it on the shelf and move on to something else. In this case, however, I was troubled by how events in the last two weeks have made what I wrote suddenly relevant in a new way. Several predictions I made at that time have, unfortunately, come to pass much sooner than I had anticipated.

However, I was completely wrong about one major thing, which I will describe here briefly and then you will see below, where I have reproduced the piece without any updates to the content as it stood two months ago. My topic was the lack of interest of the American public in the refugee crisis, and I offered several materialistic and interest-based reasons that Americans should "care" about the refugee crisis beyond the obvious moral reasons. What I had not prepared for was the way in which the recent Paris attacks and the shootings in San Bernardino would alter the conversation about the refugee crisis. I had approached the matter as one of providing some direction toward an antidote for apathy. I had not considered the possibility that if Americans did begin to "care," that the way that they would do so would be in the form of incendiary xenophobia of a startlingly fascist texture.

It is interesting, and in this case rather frightening, to look at the naïveté of my take on the problem, pre-Paris. I really had not thought that American society would go from a near-total lack of interest to a near-total hysteria of hate and fear. What ended up happening is akin to a person snoozing by a pool being bumped in and, in a second, going from motionlessness to arm-flapping frenzy.

Without further introduction, here is the piece I wrote in late September 2015:

5 Reasons Why Americans Should Care About the Refugee Crisis

My wife and I are big fans of Stephen Colbert, particularly because of his history of bringing awareness to important issues and contributing to important causes. Part of his appeal is that he is a good person. Imagine our disappointment, then, that we’re still waiting for something more than a passing mention of the global refugee crisis from his new pulpit as host of The Late Show. Still, maybe it’s not really Colbert's fault. It just shows that America doesn’t really care very much about the refugees and isn’t really interested in doing anything about helping them.

It’s hard to deny Americans’ lack of interest in this issue. Despite the ripples of shock felt here over images of the body of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned off the coast of Turkey on September 2nd, that boy’s death and his family’s pain hasn’t sparked a movement in this country. It was a blip on the radar of a country consumed with less important things, like the wiles of Donald Trump. The conservative blowhard that Colbert lampooned so well may be gone, but Colbert the real person is still at his core a reflection of the American reality, as are we all. All of us tend to care about things only if lots of people start caring.

Herein lies a hard question, though. Why should Americans care about the refugee crisis? It is easy to state moral reasons: they are people like us, they are victims of vast conflicts beyond their control, they are dying in the thousands. The problem with this way of thinking is that it doesn’t get us very far in actually responding to the issue, even though it seems like it does. Feeling something is not a form of aid; it’s a pat on the back for confirming one’s ability to still feel anything at all in a world filled with human suffering. Eventually, I’ve no doubt we’ll tally the numbers and find that millions of refugees attempting to flee Middle Eastern and African conflicts died. At that time, we’ll shake our heads in sincere but impotent regret and open a new tab to check Facebook, just like we’re doing right now as the crisis unfolds.

If we’re not going to do anything with our moral indignation, perhaps we should thus be painfully self-centered about the situation—because the refugee crisis in fact affects us and our way of life very negatively, and it is to our economic and political benefit to work together to resolve the issue. So, with the coldness of logic applied, here are five reasons why Americans should care about the refugee crisis:

1. The longer the refugee crisis continues, the more it will cost America money. We don’t like to calculate human costs in terms of dollars, but human lives have an economic value. Alan Kurdi not only died needlessly, he died without the opportunity to contribute to the global economy. And not all refugees will die during their flight, but they will not have an economic profile until they settle somewhere. The United States is at the center of the most globalized network of intersecting economies in human history. The refugee crisis has the potential to act as either a negative economic catalyst or a positive one, depending on whether a cash-strapped yet aging European population decides to treat the refugees like invaders or gifts from God. American influence should be used to push Europe to consider them the latter. We need to get the refugees to safety so they can start making money and contributing to society. Until then, aid won’t produce a return on the investment and American economic activities in Europe will suffer.

2. Extremism will balloon as refugee communities find themselves in impossible situations. People who believe that religious extremism is primarily metaphysical rather than material and structural are stupid and need to, at long last, be ignored in serious discussions. Extremism is very clearly a religious response to real-world pressures, even if it is by definition an excessive response and thus irrational. This is the worst refugee crisis to hit Europe since 1945. Millions of people are boxed in between borders they can’t cross and homes they can’t return to; they literally have no way out. If the situation doesn’t change quickly, many of them, especially the youth, will begin to believe in the vile messages spewed by the agent provocateurs that Islamic terrorist groups like to plant in Europe’s Muslim communities. A narrow, combative response to the crisis by the West will produce the very conditions whereby extremism emerges, and an American foreign policy that hinges on European and Middle Eastern stability will be upended.

3. The European far-right will begin to win elections. Even before the refugee crisis, far-right European parties like Hungary’s Jobbik, Finland’s True Finns, and, especially, France’s National Front were gaining ground in their respective countries as well as in the European Parliament. Other conservative parties, like Poland’s Law & Justice, are moving rightward, as party leaders have sensed that aggressive nationalism polls well. Some naïve observers discount the European far-right as a bunch of cryptofascist crazies. That may be true, but these crazies are decidedly modern in their focus: today’s nationalists in Europe are obsessed with immigration and rabidly Islamophobic. A meme making its way around Polish social media features a picture of Chernobyl, over which is written a suggestion that the refugees be sent there because it has plenty of space. Hate-filled people tend to vote for politicians who make them feel good about being miserable bastards, and the refugee crisis is their Reichstag Fire. It will be used to galvanize support for their platforms in elections for years to come. And guess what? These parties, with few exceptions, absolutely hate America too. The victory of the far-right in Europe will, as it ever has, threaten the collapse of America’s relationship with Europe.

4. Transnational proxy wars will erupt, leading to inevitable deployments of American forces. A more cynical person than I might venture that America’s hawks (almost all of whom are of the chicken variety) would pursue a non-response to the refugee crisis in order to set the stage for further fruitless wars in Muslim countries. However, even those with leveler heads (that is, any who’d balk at putting boots on the ground in the many and diverse proxy wars that will erupt as a result of this vast movement of people) should put their money where their mouth is. America’s more reasonable leaders must be willing to spend capital—both the paper and political kind—to find homes for the refugees, unless they want to be responsible for the seeds of the type of conflicts that America’s pro-war crowd is exceptionally good at getting us involved in—conflicts that, as a depressing rule, necessitate that American soldiers die for reasons that make no sense and motives that a serial killer would find rather cold and ethically suspect.

5. America will lose its reputation as a defender of the global public good (maybe for good this time). American conservatives may not believe it, but the truth is that President Obama as well as Secretaries of State Clinton and Kerry have done a great deal of work to rehabilitate the image of the United States internationally after the disastrous Bush years. Even among liberals, however, there is a strange and ignorant (though probably also well-intentioned) assumption that the rest of the world hates us as power-hungry monsters. This simply isn’t true. The United States is still looked to as a beacon of relief from oppression by much of the globe—an opinion that is justified on the human if not the international level. America’s profile as a “good” country (a “true” world leader) could be invaluably reinforced by a heartier response to the crisis. On the other hand, global opinion is fickle, and a lackluster response will be punished.

America must be a leader in the response to the refugee crisis. In concrete terms, this means taking in at least several hundred thousand refugees and spending several billion dollars to aid in resettlement, at once providing direct aid to refugee communities and reducing the burden on European governments. Such actions are not merely helpful for moral reasons, and frankly they shouldn’t be. We’d never contribute to anything as a state if we required that altruism drove our actions above all other considerations. This is not Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets; we must have advantageous policies or else no good cause will be pursued beyond self-righteous, think-of-the-children tsk-tsking. In this case, America’s main benefit in responding to the refugee crisis is relational and reputational, as the line between outsiders’ judgment of America as Great Savior or Great Satan can be extremely thin. Alan Kurdi needed a savior and didn’t get one, while his still-breathing compatriots wait in limbo for theirs.